Book Summary

by Letcia Gonalves

Service Design overview

In this chapter the authors present the case study of Norways largest insurance company which helps understand the overall service design process, from small details to the business strategy: The company employed service designers to challenge their thinking about what the ideal insurance service would look like. The approach taken in this project is an example of classic service design insights research, workshops, service blueprinting, service proposition development, concept sketches and presentations, experience prototyping, testing, and delivery. A fairly small sample of users was involved in the research, but the research went deep. Five different areas were researched with the participants: insurance in general, social aspects, choices, contact, and tools for staff. Previously, customers had an interaction with a salesperson in which they talked through a complicated policy, then would go home and explain it to their partners, but could not remember the details well enough to explain it. Because they could no longer understand it, customers could not make a decision. Redesigning this touchpoint helped people make a decision at home, and the company avoided losing customers because of this hidden problem. This is a good example of how services are created and experienced by interactions between people, often in a completely different context than the usual customer-provider paradigm. The value of gaining real insights from all stakeholders customers, staff, and management is only half of the story. Translating these insights into a clear service proposition, and experience prototyping the key touchpoints, are essential. As with much service design, the challenge was to make the invisible visible, or to make the right things visible and get rid of the noise in the rest of the offering. Service design methods helped them create a complete and shared picture of what really provides value to the customer, as well as processes to join up the experiences.

1 Insurance is a 2 Service not a 3 Product 4 5 6 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

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Taxonomy of services:
- Services are about interactions between people, and their motivations and behaviors, which is why understanding people is at the heart of service design. - They are co-produced between the provider and users. - The service experience is made up of the customers interactions with many touchpoints, and service quality can be defined by how well the touchpoints work together for the customer. - The service multiple touchpoints should be designed in a holistic way, satisfying experience. - Services Core offerings can be grouped into three primary spheres: care, response, and access. the service has different core values at different times. - Their ubiquity leads them to being taken for granted by both users and providers alike. Thus, they become almost invisible elements of life. As a result, service designers frequently need to make the invisible visible by showing customers what has gone on behind the scenes, showing staff what is happening in the lives of customers, and showing everyone the resource usage that is hidden away. - The point of difference for any specific service is how it is delivered, the performance of the service. Performance is a helpful word, because it means two things: performance as experience and performance as value. This experience aspect of performance is the delivery of the service to the service user on the front stage.This value aspect of performance is the backstage measure of the service by the businessall the things that happen behind the scenes that help create or run the service experience for customers but that they dont see.

2 The Nature of 3 Service Design 4 5 6 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

- Its quality often suffers due to the complexity of linking these systems together in a way that makes sense to customers. This combination of opportunities and problems is the reason why service design has emerged as a specific design approach.

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Recognize opportunities for improvement or innovation.
Despite the ability of new technologies to automate and augment peoples daily lives, people remain at the heart of services. Thus, we need to think in terms of designing for relationships and experiences that evolve and change over time, rather than just in terms of short moments of consumption or usage. The staff who interact with customers are also users and providers of internal services. To put people at the heart of services, we need to know who they are. We need to listen to them and obtain accurate information that helps us give them what they need, when they need it. We start by gathering insights. service design places more emphasis on qualitative over quantitative research methods. Qualitative research helps designers dive deeper to understand the chaos and emotions that make us human and behave in seemingly illogical ways. We are interested in peoples needs, behaviors, and motivations because these can form the basis of design problems. The purpose of the research is to generate insight about needs and behaviors that can lay a solid foundation for a productive project and robust ideas, and to confirm these by prototyping early and often to test them out. Innovation work can be excitingly blue sky and often requires thinking outside of the current norms, but the danger is that it can become distant from peoples real needs and problems. In the end, insights that drive innovation confidently answer the question: Will our offering make sense in the context of peoples lives, and will they find it valuable? When time is short and a service improvement project has a limited budget, it is often a good idea to prioritize the research time with staff and data to dig quickly into the detail that is needed to design great services. In services, a more useful way to engage with people is by looking at different stages of their relationship with the service. This strategy allows us to research the different journeys people might take through a service and how they transition through the various touchpoints. From a service point of view, we are really after understanding how different touchpoints work together to form a complete experience. Therefore, try to do research with people in the situations where they use the service. Study how people use a service at home, on the road, and at work, and then connect the dots. What is most important to look for is variation in quality between the touchpoints and the gap between expectations and experiences

2 3 Understanding 4 People and 5 Relationships 6 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

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Tools and Methods
A useful way to think about the process of research and generate insights, that will depend on your budget, is in three levels of detail (and effort): - Low (What They Say) - Around four or five research participants say in relatively short depth interviews (say, 45 minutes). Output: Brief executive summary and the top five observations from the depth interviews - Middle (What We Saw) - Research with around 10 participants.Output: Top insights plus a summary, but is more indepth than the low level of analysis - High (What It Means) - More depth interviews and a combination of other insights techniques to generate the data. Output: can be more varied, including those from the low and middle variants, but may extend to a short video or a workshop with the client and/ or other stakeholders to share and build on the insights gained through the initial research. possible through drawing and other creative activities. An engaging interview is the key to a productive rapport. In the interview sometimes it is best to be a little nave because it prevents you from making assumptions; otherwise, you will have to learn to ask deliberately nave questions. - Interviewing Consumers in Pairs Pairs provide the most truthful feedback, and you get two peoples opinions in the same time it takes to interview one person. Friendship or family cells provide a natural form of censorship. But one thing to be careful of is when one person puts opinions in the mouth of the other. Also children or teenagers tend to feel uncomfortable when interviewed on their own. - Business-to-Business Depth Interviews In a one-to-one context, they are more likely to tell you things about their company that they might not say in front of their colleagues or superiors. This kind of interviews may be better conducted in a neutral environment.

2 3 4 Turning 5 Research into Insight and 6 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

Action

Insights-Gathering Methods 1. Depth Interviews Interviews are the most efficient way to engage with people in their own context and allow them to explain how they see things. This means using a number of techniques to make interviews as engaging, informal, and as interactive as

2. Participant Observation Participant observation, or shadowing, provides rich, in-depth, and accurate insights into how people use products, processes, and procedures. It is very

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Tools and Methods
useful for understanding context, behavior, motivations, interactions, and the reality of what people do, rather than what they say they do. It gives good depth and insight into latent needsthe things people actually need, but perhaps do not know that they need because they are so used to their old routine. 3. ParticipationBecoming the User It is an excellent strategy for developing empathy and asking questions clients might not think of. Researchers can experience things for themselves that may be hard for someone to describe to them. 4. Service Safaris It gives participantsusually members of the project team from the client side firsthand experience of other (sometimes seemingly unrelated) services. Participants use these other services for a few hours or even a day. This experience may provide ideas that they can transfer back to their own business. 5. User Workshops Use probe-like tasks. Encourage pairs of friends to attend, as they are likely to be more comfortable with this dynamic and more truthful in their answers. These kinds of workshops are a great way to quickly produce large numbers of insights and ideas. 6. Probes and Tools Using only verbal inputs during interviews or workshops can be limiting. Some people can describe or envisage their world, thoughts, feelings, and relationships better through images, diagrams, sketches, and activities. - Events Timelines and Journey Maps - Diaries - Venn Diagrams - Brand Sheets - Probe Cameras - Photograph Lists - Visual Interpretations - Item Labels Collating and Presenting Your Insights The different forms we can use are relatively standard in design. They range from sticky notes, whiteboard sketches, and printouts on the wall to digital tools and more formal presentation forms. Three approaches to synthesize the data collected into a form that can be presented and discussed are: - Insights Blogs - Insights Boards - Client Workshops

2 3 4 Turning 5 Research into Insight and 6 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

Action

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The Service Ecology
In a project first it is sometimes necessary to gain a sense of the context in which the service is operating, which is usually complex. This can be map out in a service ecologya diagram of all the actors affected by a service and the relationships between them, displayed in a systematic manner. A healthy ecology is one in which everyone benefits, rather than having the value flow in one direction only. As an exercise, mapping a service ecology can be very effective in a client workshop as a means to broaden the project space. Why are so many service experiences awful when parts of them are seemingly well designed? Because lack of attention paid to the invisible elements of time and context, both of which are critical to the experience of a service. Most people forget to think about designing the experience of the arrows, which are the transitions from one touchpoint to the next. Yet these connections contain some of the most important elements of positive experiences because they signify movement in time and space. Image Link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/ 8462236014/in/set-72157632731881073

2 3 4 5 Describing the 6 Service Ecology 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

Looking at services as ecologies also emphasizes the point that all of the actors in a service exchange some sort of value. Channels are the overall medium and a touchpoint is an individual moment of interaction within that channel.

Silos within organizations can prevent engaging and positive service experiences from happening, because the seemingly small cracks between the individual silo elements, such as the discrepancies between online and instore offerings, can soon open up into experience crevasses.

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The Service Blueprint
The Service Blueprint is a good tool to organize the complexity of connecting together all of the different touchpoints in a service experience, as well as aligning the needs and wishes of all of an organizations stakeholders. This way it enables designers to understand and describe how service works. A service blueprint is a map of: - The user journey - phase by phase, step by step - The touchpoints - channel by channel, touchpoint by touchpoint - The backstage processes - stakeholder by stakeholder, action by action If you are developing a new service, think through how all the touchpoints connect together as a complete experience. This is also true if you are improving an existing service, but in this case you will have to decide whether this iteration of your blueprint is intended as an analytical tool to uncover problems or whether you want to include all the new ideas in it, too. mapping is one of the best ways to identify the changing contexts of a customers interactions with the company over time. Mapping the journey brings understanding of what customers are feeling, thinking, and doing at any given point in time when they are interacting with a service, and recognition of how that changes. A good model of the journey tells a story through the layering of qualitative and Image Link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/ 8462239078/in/set-72157632731881073

quantitative information. With the element of time, this visual model is the quickest and most effective way to tell a story. A typical service blueprint template, with the phases of the customer journey along the top (here its Aware, Join, Use, Develop, Leave) and the various touchpoint channels in rows underneath, including the backstage activities at the bottom.

2 3 4 5 Describing the 6 Service Ecology 7 8 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

The entire purpose of service design blueprinting is to ensure that all the different elements across all touchpoints are not designed in isolation. The blueprint leads to the design specifications for each touchpoint and acts as a way to orchestrate them all. Service design is both broad and deep.

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Through the eyes of customers/users
The service proposition is essentially the business proposition, but seen from both the business and the customer/user perspective. It is important that some kind of business model lies behind the serviceeven if it is a free or public serviceotherwise it will not be sustainable or resilient to change. The usual approaches and questions apply: Who is going to fund it? What is the price point and market segment? What do we need to deliver the service, and what will it cost? The service proposition needs to be based on real insights garnered from the research. It is important when sketching out the ideas at this early stage that the following three questions can be answered: Do people understand what the new service is or does? Do people see the value of it in their life? Do people understand how to use it? In this chapter the authors also present how to use the service blueprint to view the complexity of a service through the eyes of customers or users taking a journey over time and across the multiple channels of the delivery of a service. Choosing a few key touchpoints that express the core of the service is a useful way to get started, whether innovating new services or improving existing ones. Taking journeys through the blueprint is a way to choose the touchpoints concentrate effort. Once you have mapped a particular users journey across the phases of the service experience and through his or her chosen subset of the touchpoints, you can put together a journey summary. This is essentially a scenario storyboard of each phase of the journey (or steps, if you are looking into finer detail) with a description of what happens and what kind of experience the user should have. From this you can create a more detailed phase or step summary document that describes what the user experience should be across all the channels at that stage of the journey. This summary should also document the connections between different backstage elements of the service and how they need to interact to deliver the required frontstage user experience. It details what kind of experience you want to offer the customer and the implications this has for the technical delivery and business process. You may want to use it to flag certain mission-critical elements or activities. In both the phase and journey summaries, your notes can also include material from your insights research. This may be either what existing users have said about the current service or the needs your insights uncovered that have led to the proposed new service. Moving back and forth between the concept development and the insights research keeps your design process grounded in reality.

2 3 4 5 6 Developing the 7 Service 8 Proposition 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

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The Service Experience
Designers can design the conditions for an experience, and one can see the importance of experience in many aspects of design. In a service design context, covering almost all of the aspects and interactions in services that are important to be aware of and consider in design, experiences can be divided into four main categories: - User experience: interactions with technologies - Customer experience: experiences with retail brands ! - Service provider experience: what it is like on the other side - Human experience: the emotional effect of services (e.g., healthcare) that impact quality of life and well-being The fundamental concept to embrace when you design a service is that perceived quality is defined by the gap between what people expect and what they actually experience. The curve of the experience should be flat, if you exceed expectations at a certain point, you have already set yourself up to disappoint at the next interaction if you cannot deliver at the same level. When you set consistent expectations in each interaction and fulfill them in the next, people will feel quality. Service Experience Prototyping: People need to experience a service or touchpoint before they can tell you what does not work and what really makes a difference. The experience prototyping could be divided in four levels:

2 3 4 5 6 7 Prototyping 8 Service Experiences 9

Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

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Customer experience and prots- a win-win situation.
The key to making the business case for service design is to focus on how you want the work to change customer behavior, and then estimate the potential impact on the business in numbers. When Measuring Services: What needs to be measured is whether a service meets peoples expecta- tions at different stages. If people have a great experience when they are first sold the service, does it live up to expectations in everyday use? Does a service that is simple to start with give people a greater depth of experience when they gain competency in using it? When do people consider changing providers? How difficult is it for them to leave a service? The key thing to learn from measuring across touchpoints is to understand which channels set customer expectations too high to fulfil in the next interaction, and which perform too badly to keep up with the rest of the experience. It is these outliers that destroy the service experience, not the touchpoints that perform to expectation every time. Some typical behaviors often addressed in service design projects can be translated to results on the bottom line: - New sales: increased acquisition of new customers - Longer use: increased loyalty and retention of customers - More use: increase in revenue for every customer - More sales: increased sales of other services from the same provider - More self-service: reduced costs - Better delivery processes: reduced costs - Better quality: increased value for money and competitiveness It is important to measure across the time of the customer journey not just an individual touchpoint experience in isolationas well as across channels. Individual touchpoints can score high customer satisfaction ratings, but they also set up expectations for the transition to another touchpoint. These transitions are impor- tant to take into account because they make up a large part of the service experience. Measurement data can be shared with staff as a performance indi- cator, which aligns the customers interests with those of the staff. It also provides motivation for an organizations employees. Measurement can (and should) take into account the triple bottom line of economic, environmental, and social impacts.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Measuring 9 Services
Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

Authors vision of where service design is heading

Crucially, service design provides not only a different way of just thinking about these problems, but the tools and methods to tackle them through design, implementation, and measurement. Clearly, service design is not a panacea. Its future is in collaboration within multidisciplinary teams and with multiple stakeholders, as the examples in this book and from the organizations mentioned above demonstrate. As much as it is important for service designers to have an understanding of the economics and management concerns of business, the complexities of climate change, or the history of international development, it is perhaps more important to learn to work closely with experts in these areas. Service design is a powerful addition to the range of approaches that we need to design a better, more inclusive, and thoughtful future.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The challenges...
Book Summary
by Letcia Gonalves

Authors:
Andy Polaine has been involved in interaction design since the early 1990s and was co-founder of the award-winning new media group Antirom in London. Now living in Germany, he divides his time between being a Research Lecturer in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland, and his work as an independent service and interaction design consultant and writer. Lavrans Lvlie has worked as a design consultant since 1994. Before setting up live|work in London with Chris Downs and Ben Reason, he worked as an interaction designer in Norway and Denmark. Ben Reason is a co-founder of live|work. He graduated from Liverpool John Moores University in 1994 with a BA in Fine Arts, followed in 2000 with an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath. Ben has a background in design and innovation in network-enabled services.